Here at work, we've been working with Dell to fix an odd problem we're seeing on some of our computers. To give you a little background, we ordered a bunch of 1.8GHz Precision 340's in the spring of 2002. When we opened a new building in the fall of 2002, we bought another 70+ Precisions to fill it. The only difference is that they had 2.4GHz P4's. Oddly enough the older 1.8GHz machines work fine.. the problem is with the ones with 2.4GHz CPU's.
The problem is that we're seeing decreased network performance when run at 100 full (they have on board 3com 920's) When launching a program over the network, it normally would take say 40 seconds to launch. On these computers it takes 3-30 minutes. As a short term solution, we've manually set the NIC's to 10 full.
For the heck of it, I took the CPU and memory from a 1.8GHz machine and put it in a 2.4GHz. Surprisingly the problem went away. After doing some poking around, I realized that while the memory is running at 400MHz on both machines, the CPU's Dell put in the 2.4GHz ones ran at 533MHz and the FSB:DRAM timings were 4:3.
My question to all of you: Does anyone know if there are any issues with the Intel 850/850E chipset and running your CPU and memory at different timings? I know there were some PCI latency problems with some early P4 chipsets and PCI video cards, but I have not found anything that would explain the problems I'm seeing. Thoughts?
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